Saartjie Baartman was a beautiful South African showgirl
with an irresistible bottom - no wonder she caused such a sensation in Georgian
England. Rachel Holmes on the legend of the 'Hottentot Venus' Saturday March 31, 2007The Guardian

The body of Saartjie Baartman, better known as the Hottentot Venus, has had
greater influence on the iconography of the female body in European art and
visual culture than any other African woman of the colonial era. Saartjie, a
South African showgirl in the early 19th century, was a small, beautiful woman,
with an irresistible bottom. Of a build unremarkable in an African context, to
some western European eyes she was extraordinary. Today, she is celebrated as
bootylicious.

Saartjie was not only the African woman most frequently represented in racially
marked British and French visual culture, she also had less immediately visible
influences on western art. In an age when art and science were commonly regarded
as bedfellows, her image appeared in a proliferation of media, from popular to
high culture. Saartjie was depicted in scientific and anatomical drawings, in
playbills and aquatint posters, in cartoons, paintings and sculpture. Both
during her life and after her death, caricaturists Thomas Rowlandson and George
Cruikshank made her the subject of works typifying London life and the
Napoleonic era. Saartjie's body cast was one of the inspirations for Matisse's
revolutionary restructuring of the female body in The Blue Nude (1907), prompted
by African sculpture and conceived, as Hugh Honour argues, "as an 'African'
Venus: that her skin is not black is hardly of significance in view of his
attitude to colour".

Who was Saartjie Baartman? Not a question anyone will ask in South Africa, where
she is a national icon; nor in America, where her life, legend and relevance are
well understood. Yet in Britain, where she came to fame and had such an
influence, she is less well remembered. Rumoured to be a slave brought to
England against her will, Saartjie was an orphaned Khoisan maidservant born in
1789 on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony. She was 21 years old when she
was smuggled from Cape Town to London. Her employer, a free black man named
Hendrik Cesars, was manservant to a British Army medical officer named Alexander
Dunlop. Dunlop persuaded Cesars that Saartjie had lucrative potential as
entertainment and a scientific curiosity in England, which had a thriving stage
trade in human and scientific curiosities. A woman from the so-called "Hottentot
tribe", who, legend held, had amazing buttocks and strangely elongated labia,
might provide an exceptional draw. Saartjie was persuaded: Dunlop, she said, had
"promised to send her back rich".

Billed as the Hottentot Venus, Saartjie first performed in Piccadilly on
September 24 1810. Dressed in a figure-hugging body stocking, beadwork, feathers
and face-paint, she danced, sang and played African and European folk songs on
her ramkie, forerunner to the tin-can guitar. Slung over her costume was a
voluminous fur cloak (kaross). Enveloping her from neck to feet, it was an
African version of the corn-gold tresses of Botticelli's Venus - and every inch
of its luxuriant, curled hair was equally suggestive.

To London audiences, she was a fantasy made flesh, uniting the imaginary force
of two powerful myths: Hottentot and Venus. The latter invoked a cultural
tradition of lust and love; the former signified all that was strange,
disturbing and - possibly - sexually deviant. Almost overnight, London was
overtaken by Saartjie mania. Within a week, she went from being an anonymous
immigrant to one of the city's most talked-about celebrities. Her image became
ubiquitous: it was reproduced on bright posters and penny prints, and she became
the favoured subject of caricaturists and cartoonists.

Bottoms were big in late-Georgian England. From low to high culture, Britain was
a nation obsessed by buttocks, bums, arses, posteriors, rumps - and with every
metaphor, joke or pun that could be squeezed from this fundamental distraction.
Georgian England both celebrated and deplored excess, grossness, bawdiness and
the uncontainable. In Rowlandson's cartoon, amply proportioned white
Englishwomen are depicted trying to plump up their already big bottoms in
imitation of Saartjie, who loftily presides over them all.

Saartjie's instant celebrity owed much to a coincidence between the Georgian
fascination with bottoms, the size of the derrière of Lord Grenville, and the
British tradition of visual satire. The aristocratic Grenville family were famed
for their huge bums. The nation was rife with speculation that Grenville would
become prime minister and his Whig coalition - known as the broad-bottoms or the
bottomites - take over parliament. An engraving by William Heath depicts
Grenville dressed as the Hottentot Venus. In another, by George Cruikshank from
1816, Saartjie's profile is compared with that of the Prince Regent.

A month after Saartjie's show opened, the abolitionists, convinced she was
brought to England and forced to perform against her will, began a High Court
lawsuit on her behalf that electrified the English public and press. When asked
whether she would prefer to go to Bible school and then return home, or stay in
England performing with a contract and a salary, Saartjie said, "Stay here."
Unable to prove that she performed unwillingly, the case collapsed. Her choices
were limited: a return to servitude in colonised South Africa, or exploitation
in free England. The Hottentot Venus show went on.

Saartjie arrived in France in 1814, a recognised icon preceded by her reputation
as a scantily clad totem goddess. Napoleonic Paris greeted her as a celebrity.
In France, as in Britain, her image proliferated - with a significant
difference: where English representations exaggerated the size of her buttocks,
French portrayals show attempts to be more true to life.

In the spring of 1815, Saartjie posed for three days as a life model for a panel
of Europe's leading Enlightenment scientists, naturalists, and staff painters at
the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle. Georges Cuvier, Henri de Blainville
and Étienne Saint-Hilaire led the scientific team. Resident artists Léon de
Wailly, Nicolas Huet and Jean-Baptiste Berré produced delicate watercolour
portraits of her figure. As well as integral to the "scientific" project, these
illustrations became collectible popular art, copied and sold in great quantity.
De Wailly's tactful portrait - used as her official image by the ANC - is drawn
with evocative, poignant sensibility. In this image Saartjie stands in the
antique pose of the Cnidian Venus, so beloved of Renaissance sculptors; a figure
that would reappear later in the 19th century in the Orientalist grandes
odalisques of Ingres and Renoir.

Saartjie died at the end of 1815, aged just 26. Indignity followed her in death:
within 48 hours, her body had been dissected, her bones boiled, and her brain
and genitals bottled. Cuvier, the father of both comparative anatomy and
palaeontology, conducted the post-mortem examination. Plaster casts were taken
of her body. Once the whole figure was integrated, "sculptors and artists
finished the lines to the mould, polished the model surface with oil of
turpentine, and then skin, vessels were painted on; the whole covered in a coat
of clear varnish". For nearly two centuries these relics were kept in the Muséum
national d'Histoire naturelle, on public display. Posthumously imprisoned in
Paris, Saartjie's violated body became one of Europe's most analysed specimens.
From these lifeless and fragile remnants, European scientists manufactured
monstrous, crackpot pseudo-scientific theories proposing biological differences
between human groups.

South Africa never forgot Saartjie. The end of apartheid was the crucial turning
point in her afterlife. In 1994, when the African National Congress achieved the
country's transition to non-racial democracy, President Mandela raised the
matter of Saartjie with President Mitterrand during his first state visit to
South Africa. Supporting the long-running campaign for the return of Saartjie's
remains initiated by the anthropologist Professor Philip Tobias, Mandela told
Mitterrand that it was time for her to come home.

Claiming right of possession to Saartjie's remains and honouring her as a heroic
national ancestor was the first act of international cultural reparation made on
behalf of free South Africa. The French people and politicians supported her
repatriation, but museologists raised ridiculous objections that she was still a
viable object of "scientific" study and French patrimony. Henri de Lumley,
director of the Musée de l'Homme, claimed insultingly that she would be "safer"
and better preserved "cherished in the home of liberty, fraternity and equality,
than in South Africa".

Saartjie's remains became central to the ongoing debate over the return of the
cultural heritage, plundered from formerly colonised nations, that fills
European museums. Responding to the hysteria that Saartjie's return would open
the floodgates to similar requests, Ben Ngubane, minister of culture, wryly
observed that South Africa was unlikely to request the return of all its
plundered patrimony, as there isn't room in Africa to store it. Brigitte
Mabandla, deputy minister of culture, pointed out that: "The end of colonialism
is tied to the return of Africa's cultural heritage ... Scholars argue that
200-year-old remains should be classified as ordinary artifacts, and tools for
research, and that there is no need to attach emotions to them. This is a
fallacy. Europe is littered with ancient heritage, and there is a lot of passion
associated with heritage by Europeans themselves."

It took a further eight years and the intervention of Mandela's successor, Thabo
Mbeki, before Saartjie's remains were released. In May 2002 they were flown back
to South Africa, and on August 9, National Women's Day, Saartjie was honoured
with a state funeral in the Gamtoos River Valley, her birthplace. Mbeki gave her
funeral speech. Today, Saartjie Baartman is modern South Africa's most revered
female historical icon of the colonial era.

Saartjie's legacy has been to carry the burden of racist representation for
colonial and imperialist history. Visual representations of her body are fraught
with the negative consequences of reproducing offensive iconography. These
images persist as products of a white society whose imposed perceptions damaged
and subordinated the lives, consciousness and body-image of millions of people.
The history of the Hottentot Venus raises vexing questions about intention and
audience when reproducing racist representations, but it also highlights the
dangers of censorship. Images of Saartjie are part of her story: they will
offend, but no good ever came of locking pictures in the attic. Images of
subjected slaves kneeling, or celebrating their release, were unthinkingly
reproduced long after abolition.

It's striking that Saartjie was never shown in a classic slave image. This is
not to propose some fatuous notion of a more liberal intention by the white men
who depicted her: these men, and their racialised perceptions, were products of
their time. Saartjie's body was subjected to indignity and exaggeration, but
there has been less careful reflection on the ways in which she subsequently
influenced the emergence of the modernist female form, or of how she might be
celebrated now, as she is in African and transatlantic black popular music and
body culture. Hopefully, a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery,
timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade
Act, will begin to challenge the omission of Saartjie and recognise her
influence on British culture.

Far from outlandish or unfamiliar to the western eye, the evolving historical
conventions of the female nude in European art are apparent in many
representations of the Hottentot Venus, as is her influence. Saartjie's death in
Paris coincided with the repatriation to Italy of the famous Roman statue known
as the Medici Venus. Plundered from the Palazzo Uffizi by Napoleon in 1802, this
celebrated Hellenistic statue was crated up and sent back to Florence in
December 1815. Fleet Street, appreciating the coincidence, went for the bottom
line, capturing the Platonic assertion that there are two Venuses in western
culture, one celestial, the other vulgar:

The Venus of Medicis scarcely has flown,
When Paris, alas! Your next Venus is gone;
And no end to your losses you find:
Well may you in sackcloth and ashes deplore;
For the former fair form had no equal before,
And the latter no equal behind.

The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman (Born 1789 - Buried
2002) by Rachel Holmes is published by Bloomsbury.

Last
Updated:
12:01am GMT 18/03/2007

Goddess of the
freakshows

Lucy Moore
reviews The Hottentot Venus: the Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman by
Rachel Holmes

Early-19th-century Londoners were fascinated by scientific (and
not-so-scientific) discoveries and curiosities. They crowded into
fairground tents and gimcrack Piccadilly exhibition rooms to gawp at
Siamese twins, stuffed birds and animals from far-off lands, and
demonstrations of electricity.

Stars of the
freak-show scene included men billed as the fattest and thinnest who had
ever lived; tiny Caroline Crachami, the "Sicilian Fairy", who stood less
than two feet tall; and the mottled West Indian "Piebald Boy", whose
skin onlookers were encouraged to rub to prove he was not painted.

The sensation
of the 1810 season was a 21-year-old Khoisan woman from South Africa known as
the Hottentot Venus. Saartjie Baartman appeared on stage almost naked, in a
skin-tight, flesh-coloured body stocking with a small embroidered apron covering
her pubis and long strings of tribal beads. She sang Khoi and Afrikaans folk
songs, played the ramkie (a tin-can guitar) and danced "in the manner of her
country". For a small additional payment, audience members could touch her
exotically large behind.

As Rachel
Holmes writes in The Hottentot Venus, the stage-name chosen for Saartjie
was a potent one. By the time Saartjie arrived in London, Hottentots - the
European name for South African cattle tribesmen - were associated with
servility, barbarity and promiscuity. "United, the words Hottentot and Venus...
coupled Eros with notions of ugliness, desire with degradation, license with
taboo, and transcendent goddess with carnal beast; they articulated the alarming
siren allure of feminine concupiscence - Aristotle's fascinating, terrifying
animal avidum generandi, the beast greedy for generation."

While Holmes
makes much of Saartjie as an "African Venus", describing her "pert" nipples and
the fur of the cape she wore as suggestively "luxuriant, labial, curled", her
actual stage presence seems to have belied the wanton image her promoters aimed
at. Often ill in the unfamiliar climate or, increasingly, drunk, she was seen by
audiences as, by turns, bold, witty, tired, reluctant, innocent or reckless.

Disappointingly
Holmes does not include enough quotes from the source material to allow us to
separate her ideas about Saartjie's experiences from what Saartjie herself
expressed about them and what her contemporaries observed. At times Holmes blurs
the line between documentation and imaginative reconstruction without adequate
notes.

Saartjie had
travelled a long way to the Piccadilly stage on which she made her London debut.
Born in the Gamtoos river valley on the contested eastern frontier of the Cape
Colony and orphaned in her teens, she had been taken to Cape Town, where for a
few years she worked as an indentured servant for a "Free Black" family. Here
Holmes is on firmer ground, outlining the intricate gradations of
late-18th-century Cape Town society with surety and sympathy.

Although no
Khoisan person was permitted to leave the Colony without the explicit permission
of the Governor, a discredited doctor (who may have been Saartjie's lover) and
her master conspired to smuggle Saartjie to London in 1810, hoping to make their
fortunes by displaying her as a scientific curiosity. Their instincts about what
Londoners wanted to see were spot on: Saartjie's show became a huge success.

But some
members of the audience, three years after the slave trade had been abolished by
Parliament, were appalled rather than titillated. Unlike Josephine Baker, with
whose career Holmes draws interesting parallels, ultimately Saartjie was unable
to play on the prejudices and unspoken desires of her era and turn them to her
own advantage. She was simply defenceless.

Saartjie's life
ended in Paris in 1815. Her master had sold her to an unscrupulous showman of
the Palais Royal who, when it became apparent that she was more valuable to him
dead than alive, allowed her to drink herself to death. Her corpse was sold to
the Museum of Natural History and intimately examined and dissected by
scientists who believed that her physiognomy would provide clues to the origin
of mankind.

Holmes sees in
this interest in her body a "morbid, deeply eroticised obsession", but does not
back this up with specific citations. Poignantly, as Holmes observes, the eau de
vie that killed her also embalmed her dissected brain and genitalia.

In a
post-colonial era, the story of Saartjie Baartman's life mirrors the intense
vulnerabilities of millions of people humiliated and exploited by Western
paternalistic, imperial society over the centuries. "This young woman was
treated as if she was something monstrous," said Nicholas About, petitioning the
French Senate in 2002 for Saartjie's remains to be released to the South African
government. "But where in this affair is the true monstrosity?"

When Saartjie's
remains were brought back to South Africa in 2002 she was hailed as a national
heroine. As a journalist covering the event said, her repatriation addressed
powerful issues of culture, identity and national reparation: "Rarely has one
figure meant so much to an entire country." After such an unhappy short life,
and almost two centuries of turbulent after-life, Saartjie Baartman finally
rests at peace in her homeland.

Last
Updated:
12:01am GMT 18/03/2007

Tribeswoman
turned exotic exhibit

Lawrence
Norfolk reviews The Hottentot Venus: the Life and Death of Saartjie
Baartman by Rachel Holmes

Epigraphs from
the Bible, the President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki, the exotic dancer
Josephine Baker and the singer Macy Gray preface The Hottentot Venus.
The quotations cast Saartjie's life and posthumous career as a moral
homily, a political fable, a tale of rags-to-riches celebrity and of
racial and sexual exploitation. Rachel Holmes's engaged and engaging
book seeks to disentangle the real woman from this web of
interpretations.

Saartjie
Baartman was born in 1789 in the Gamtoos River valley near the eastern
border of the Dutch Cape Colony. Her family were Khoekhoens
('Hottentots', to the Europeans), part of the Khoisan people, along with
the San or so-called 'Bushmen'. Saartjie never knew her mother and was
raised by her father. When he was killed in a skirmish following the
handover of the Dutch Colony to the British, Saartjie was 'taken into
the custody' of a free black trader called Pieter Cesars.

Eighteen years
old and alone, she was brought 500 miles to Cape Town and indentured to Pieter's
brother Hendriks as a nursemaid for his infant daughter. Hendriks worked as the
manservant of Alexander Dunlop, an irascible and eccentric British Army surgeon.
When Dunlop fell out with the Governor and was forced to leave the Colony, he
and Hendriks resolved to make their fortunes in London by mounting an
exhibition. Saartjie was to be the exhibit.

Smuggled out of
Cape Town and shipped to London, the 'Hottentot Venus' appeared in September
1810 at No 225 Piccadilly where she played native songs, danced and smoked a
pipe wearing a skin-tight silk body-stocking and some strategic beads and
feathers. She rapidly became a huge attraction.

'Bottoms were
big in Georgian England,' remarks Holmes. The word 'steatopygous' was later
concocted to describe the prominent behinds of Khoisan women and Saartjie's was,
by all accounts, a typical example. She and it featured in cartoons (several are
reproduced), broadsheet ballads, satires and later, in Paris, an opera.

The term
'Hottentot' connoted a contradictory mixture of innocence and carnality in
19th-century England. Saartjie excited both sympathy and prurient curiosity. She
often appeared sullen during her daily six hours of performance and Hendriks, on
one occasion, seems to have threatened her in public with a bamboo stick.

An action was
brought on Saartjie's behalf and against Hendriks and Dunlop by anti-slavery
campaigners. But 'the most contentious court case about illegal slavery since
abolition', as Holmes describes it, resulted only in a proper commercial
contract for Saartjie.

The show went
on, moving from London to tour Britain and Ireland. Dunlop died in 1812, leaving
his modest estate to Hendriks and Saartjie. In 1814 they relocated to Paris
where the Hottentot Venus was a hit again. But Saartjie was homesick, frequently
ill and had begun to drink. When Hendriks sold her contract to a French
entrepreneur called Réaulx and departed for the Cape, Saartjie's decline
accelerated.

Her final
engagements were not before the public but a panel of scientists convened by
Georges Cuvier in the atelier of the Natural History Museum to examine and
record her physique. Drawings and paintings were made. The resulting scientific
papers describe extensive negotiations before a modest Saartjie would take off
her clothes. The winter of 1815 was a harsh one. Saartjie died in December,
probably of pneumonia exacerbated by alcoholism.

Here Holmes's
tale turns gruesome. Cuvier took a full body cast of Saartjie then dissected
her. Her brain and genitalia were preserved in alcohol while her skeleton joined
the 1,600 others in the Museum's collection. This is lurid enough. Holmes
writes, 'Cuvier had finally got what he wanted: Saartjie horizontal,
unresisting, under his knife.' Out of a 'morbid, deeply-eroticised obsession'
Cuvier 'enacted his rage against all women'.

That is
conjecture. Holmes's research is impeccable, conducted on the ground and from
primary sources in archives as far apart as Cape Town, London and Paris, but the
surviving evidence is limited; for Cuvier's villainous intentions and for
Saartjie herself. Aside from her statements in the London court case and
recollections of her reported speech, she is silent. Holmes is forced to
reconstruct.

Before leaving
for London, Saartjie is described as 'vulnerable to coercion', then 'not in a
position to negotiate' then 'lured', then 'persuaded'. But which one? What kind
of victim was Saartjie Baartman? What if she went willingly?

Her bones
remained in the Natural History Museum in Paris until, after a request from
Nelson Mandela to François Mitterrand, eight years of inter-governmental
wrangling and a change in French law, Saartjie's remains returned to South
Africa. In August 2002, she was buried in a state funeral beside the banks of
the Gamtoos River, where she had been born more than two centuries earlier.

Saartjie's life
was shaped by colonialism, economics, race and gender. In telling her
extraordinary story, Rachel Holmes's fascinating book illuminates the forces
which dominated her age, and resound in our own.

Published: 23 March 2007

BLOOMSBURY £14.99 (239pp)
£13.50

The Hottentot Venus, by Rachel Holmes

Saving Sara in an age of shame

By Jan Marsh

How should past
atrocities be remembered? They will be forgotten if not re-told, but re-telling
also repeats the horror. So, too, does re-viewing. Sudden nausea was my response
to a photograph in this book of Sara Baartman's 200-year-old skeleton being
packed for return to South Africa.

This young
woman from the Khoisan people was a victim of colonial and anthropological
exploitation. She was smuggled from Cape Town to London in 1810 to be exhibited
in Piccadilly under the mocking title "Hottentot Venus" as a freak of nature,
owing to her very large (to European eyes) bum. Spectators were invited to poke
and squeeze. This "hideous tableau", declared the human-rights activist Zachary
Macaulay, was "a disgusting... and mortifying sight".

Legal attempts
to rescue her from bondage failed when the exhibitors successfully argued that
Sara was a free contractor. She was taken on a provincial tour, and on to Paris,
in charge of a new keeper who organised both the public spectacle and private
sessions with scientists from the Collège de France led by the human anatomist
Cuvier.

These men
coerced Sara to strip, though not to display her genitals, which they
pornographically alleged were as prodigious as her buttocks. They also arranged
to take possession of her body when she died, which she duly did, aged about 27.
Almost before she was cold, they began the dissection, pickling each part for
the Museum of Natural History. Together with finely executed lithographs, which
made a woman under five feet tall look like a giantess, these gruesome remains
endowed the "Hottentot Venus" with an afterlife of abuse.

With the end of
apartheid, South Africa opened diplomatic efforts to repatriate Baartman's
bones, led by the paleoanthropologist Phillip Tobias. In 2002, she was
ceremoniously buried in her ancestral homeland.

Tragic victim
has been instated as heroic ancestor, in emblematic remembrance of historical
sufferings. The controversy has not been laid to rest, however. A newspaper
cartoon showed a packing crate incongruously labelled "Handle with Care, Dignity
and Respect". Baartman's defenders object to displays of her image as repeating
the colonial insult to her person, and to the patronising use of the diminutive
"Saartje".

In this first
post-colonial biography of Baartman, Rachel Holmes uses Saartje throughout, but
musters as much factual information as is currently possible, telling her tale
with care and respect. Parts, such as Sara's life as unpaid servant during the
first years of British rule at the Cape, can only be imaginatively related, and
the chronology is uncertain. The text bears marks of hasty composition, as when
missionaries are sighted among elephants and lions in Sara's home, or science
and philosophy are said to have "traduced" degrading theories about buttocks.
The death of Sara's father is variously dated to when she was a teenager and an
infant, while a concluding denunciation of President Mbeki's notorious views on
HIV/Aids seems out of place.

This month Sara
Baartman features in an exhibition about "exotic" visitors to Britain, alongside
Omai and Dalip Singh - more or less honourably received as celebrities - and the
Aboriginal Australians Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne who, like her, were regarded
as almost sub-human curiosities. Times change, but both the exhibition and
biography, like the current commemorations of slavery, prompt us to reflect on
ways of remembering atrocity.

Jan Marsh is
the author of 'Black Victorians' (Lund Humphries)

The TLS n.º 5429, April 20, 2007

Pinch, prod

Lucy Hughes-Hallet

The Hottentot Venus

The life and death of Saartjie Baartman born 1789 – buried 2002

256 pp. Bloomsbury £ 14.99

978 0 7475 7776 8

At the
centre of this book is a tableau as ludicrous as it is sad. It is February 1815.
In a studio in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, a naked woman stands holding a
handkerchief in front of her crotch. She is short by European standards (under
four foot six inches), and by European standards she has exceptionally large
buttocks. These are clearly visible. But the ten men in the room - three of them
artists, the remaining seven anatomists, zoologists, or physiologists — are
hoping to see behind the handkerchief. She is Saartjie Baarttman, a woman of the
Khoisan tribe from eastern South Africa, and for the past five years she has
been on show, first in Piccadilly, subsequently on tour around Britain and more
recently in the Palais Royal. She is an ailing, overworked young woman who
drinks too much brandy, but she is also an international celebrity known as “The
Hottentot Venus”.

The
scientists gathered to see her have all heard tell that Khoisan women have
something odd about their genitals. They want to take a look, but Saartjie, who
has spent up to ten hours of most days since she arrived in Enrope being gawped
at, has drawn the line here. She will not display her sexual parts. Professor
Georges Cuvier, the father of palaeontology, has tried cajolement and little
jokes. Professor Ducrotay de Blainville has offered money, and when Saartjie
refused it has taken lo peeping covertly around her backside. He’s making a fool
of himself: Saartjie is irritated.

It is
frustrating for the men of science, but though de Blainville has seen nothing
for certain, he will soon publish an influential paper “On a Woman of the
Hottentot Race”. And when Saartjie dies ten months later, Cuvier will buy her
corpse. Her pride and modesty will no longer impede his scrutiny. Her dismantled
skeleton will join the thousands of others (forty-one of then human) in Cuvier’s
Cabinet d’Anatomie Comparée; and her brain and genitals will be kept handy in
bell jars just inside the entrance to the great man’s private apartments – a
succinct image of early nineteenth-century relations between African “darkness”
and European “enlightenment” feminine “mystery” and masculine “inquiry”.

The story of
Saartjie Bartman is great parable material. When her lover and father were both
killed in a cattle raid, she came into the service of Hendrick Cesars, who was
himself servant to Alexander Dunlop, a medical officer with the British Army in
Capetown. Dunlop and Cesars together took Saartjie illegally out of the country,
along with a giraffe skin. Reaching London, they sold the skin, promptly and
profitably, but failed to find a taker for their other “object of great
curiosity”. So they set up as showmen themselves, exhibiting “The Hottentot
Venus” with immediate and prodigious success. Dressed in a skin-light, skin-coloured
silk body stocking with a tiny tasselled and beaded apron over her pubic mound,
Saartjie danced and sang and played her guitar while her public pressed around
to pinch and prod her famous bottom.

Within
weeks, this crudely exotic/erotic spectacle acquires newcomplexities of
meaning. Saartjie fell ill. Newspapers reported that she was evidently unwilling
to perform, and that Cesars would brandish a stick at her, as a tamer might at a
recalcitrant lion. Coercion and the threat of violence were now parts of the
performance. When a man in the audience laughed at Saartjie, she hit him with
her guitar, while Cesars warned that she was ‘wild as a beast’’. The tension
between sulky female subordinate and brutal master was received by most of the
public as as titillating drama, but the British slave trade had been abolished
only four years before, and the Abolitionists were still vigilantly monitoring
apparent breaches of the new law. A writ of habeas corpus was issued against
Cesars and Dunlop. In the short term, the ensuing court case achieved little
beyond free publicity for the defendants’ show, but in retrospect (and this is
what takes Rachel Holmes’ thoughtfu1 book so timely) it provides an illuminating
case history of the way illegal immigration, slavery and the sale of sexuality
can form a tangle and a trap.

Was Saartjie
free? She testified that she was. Three lawyers, and two Aftikaans-speaking
interpreters, interrogated her for three hours. She told them that she had been
brought to England with her own consent, that she was paid by her master and
that she had no desire lo return to South Africa. The court eventually concluded
that she was selling not herself but her services, as any worker was entitled to
do. The circumstances of her leaving South Africa were questionable, but Dunlop
and Cesars had managed to obtain what at least looked like official sanction.
Baffled, her would-be rescuers dropped the case, declining the judges suggestion
that they might bring a charge of public indecency.

Saartjie
didn’t want to go home. She had left behind a life of domestic service in a
country whose laws assumed people of her ethnic group were ‘imbecile”. The men
who had — to use an anachronistic term — trafficked her were exploitative, but
so were the philanthropists who interested themselves in her case. With proper
instruction, it was suggested, she could be an invaluable asset to the
Missionary Society. “Has she not as good a right to exhibit herself as Irish
Giant, or a Dwarf7’ asked Dunlop; it was a hard question to answer. It was
because she was black and female that Saartjie’s case aroused so initial and so
much righteous indignation. Her story was illustrative of important issues
relating lo immigration and the sovereignty of the individual, but it also had a
whiff of exotic sex about it, and, as Holmes writes, “prudery and prurience are
common bedfellows”.

From
salacious spectacle, to test case for the British anti-slavery movement, to
ethnographical exhibit, Saartjie was repeatedly reinvented and made use of in
her lifetime. After her death, the process continued. In the first year of his
Presidency. Nelson Mandela asked the French authorities for the restitution of
her remains. In 2002, her bones and pickled body parts were returned lo South
Africa, welcomed by rapturous crowds and solemnly buried on South African
Women’s Day. Women’s leaders called on those present to workfor gender
equality. President Thabu Mbeki made an emotive speech condemning two centuries
of racist pseudo-science. When he read out passages from Cuvier’s report of his
dissection of Saartjie, in which he compared “the Negro race” to “the monkey
tribe”, people in the crowd wept and fainted .

In 1850,
Gustave Flaubert visited Egypt, and spent a long night of ‘‘intense reverie’’
watching a dancing girl sleeping. She fascinated him because he was unable lo
communicate with her. “No one can ever really know an Oriental woman’’, he
wrote. There is an equally suggestive muteness at the core of this book.
Saartjie’ few recorded words give little away as to how she saw herself and her
life. She remains a screen on to which fantasies can be projected and theories
inscribed. In the final chapter of The Hottentot Venus, Rachel Holmes
uses Mbeki’s graveside speech as the occasion for a strongly argued attack on
his “AIDS denialism’’. She wears two hats. As a scholar she is critical of those
who made use (ideological, sexual, or commercial) of Saartjie in the past. But
she is also a director of TAC UK, which campaigns for treatment for South
Africans with HIV/AIDS: for that good cause she is not above making use of the
Hottentot Venus herself.

Literary
Review

Frances WilsonTHE ALLURE OF OTHERNESS
The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjje Baartman, Born 1789 – Buried
2002By Rachel Holmes (Bloomsbury 256pp £14.99)

Venus, Roman goddess of love, was born in the sea and came to earth floating on
a scallop shell. The Hottentot Venus, otherwise known as Saartjie Baartman, was
born in the Gamtoos River Valley in South Africa, and came to England as a
stowaway. She was taken - along with a massive and stinking giraffe skin - by a
British military doctor called Alexander Dunlop and his South African servant,
Hendrik Cesars. Together, the men saw the potential of exhibiting Saartjie's
prominent buttocks and extended labia in a freak-show.

'The
Hottentot Venus' was advertised across London during the winter of 1810 as 'the
greatest phenomenon ever exhibited in this country'. Saartjie's stage name was
inspired: combining the erotic otherness of the 'Hottentot' with the iconic
allure of the 'Venus', Dunlop and Cesars mixed two potent myths in the form of
one 22-year-old, four-foot-six woman. She represented primitive, uninhibited sex
to a culture which took seriously the new pseudo-science of ethnology and
delighted in nothing more than the public display of strangeness. As Rachel
Holmes puts it, 'The Hottentot Venus arose in London as the very apotheosis of
Europe's invented Africa, the dark continent of feminised impenetrability and
crude potency.' In other words, she offered 'sexual tourism dressed up as
education'.

Saartjie appeared on stage between twelve o'clock and four o'clock, six days a
week, in a prime location at 225 Piccadilly (funded by the sale of the giraffe
skin), where she stood alongside a mock-up of an African village. Amongst those
who paid the two shillings to see her posterior clad in a skin-tight body suit
while she danced and played her 'ramkie', a form of guitar, were the dandy Beau
Brummell and the actor Charles Kemble ('poor, poor creature', Kemble muttered
when he was introduced to her after the show by Cesars). She lived for the next
five years as an exhibit, first in England and then in Paris, where she died
aged twenty-six, by which point she was addicted to brandy. Within hours of her
death, she was dissected by the eminent surgeon Georges Cuvier, who made a
plaster cast of her body, removed her skeleton and pickled her brain and labia
in jars, where they were displayed in the Musée de l'Homme until 1985.
Saartjie's life, which was nasty, brutish and short, was followed by an
afterlife which was just as nasty and brutish, only much, much longer.

Descended from the Eastern Cape Khoisan and the nomadic San, Saartjie's
ancestors are now understood to have been the world's first peoples. Her mother
died when she was one year old; her father was murdered when she was a teenager.
She had a child herself who also died, after which the baby's father went his
own way. Alone and unprotected, she was picked up by Pieter Cesars, a free black
hunter and trader from Cape Town who wanted a wet nurse for his niece, the
daughter of Hendrik Cesars, the man who would eventually manage her career in
England. The extent to which Saartjie knew what lay in store for her when she
allowed herself to be smuggled aboard the ship is not known, and the degree to
which she was willing to exploit herself became the subject of a court case
brought by the abolitionist Zachary Macaulay (father of the historian, Thomas
Babington Macaulay), who was determined to prove against Cesars that Saartjie
was illegally transported, kept as a slave and forced to perform against her own
free will and consent. 'I have read somewhere', Macaulay wrote to the press, '
... that the air of the British Constitution is too pure to permit slavery to
exist where its influence extends.' Saartjie would become, as Holmes says, 'the
first black South African woman whose right to liberty would be put to the test
of the constitutional law in Britain'.

The
case rested on the tricky issue of consent. When she was interviewed by
Dutch-speakers, Saartjie, who could neither read nor write, insisted that she
had come to England willingly, that she was well looked-after, that she was
taking a share of the profits, and that she was confident she would be returning
home with her takings in six years' time. But as far as her interviewers were
concerned, 'to the various questions we put to her whether, if she chose at any
time to discontinue her person being exhibited, she might do so, we could not
draw a satisfactory answer from her. She understands very little of the
agreement made with her by Mr Dunlop on the 29 October and which agreement she
produced to us.' As Holmes succinctly puts it, 'Saartjie was caught in the
contradictions of Enlightenment redefinitions of human freedom. In legal terms,
abolition made the difference between slavery and servitude a question of
self-possession, not escape from economic poverty. But for Saartjie, there were
also economic advantages to be gained.'

It
took nearly a decade for Nelson Mandela to persuade the French Government to
return her body to South Africa, where, after 187 years away, Saartjie is now
buried in the valley where she was born. Her funeral, on 9 August 2002, was a
national event, presided over by Thabo Mbeki, but, inevitably, her resting place
has not been left in peace. Saartjie is still an icon, only now she represents
South Africa's brutal history.

Written with authority and economy, The Hottentot Venus is a significant and
timely book, appearing as it does in the year we are celebrating the 200th
anniversary of the abolition of the Slave Trade. Never overdramatising the
horrors she describes, never romanticising, sentimentalising or patronising her
subject, Rachel Holmes has produced a laceratingly powerful story. Saartjie Baartman has
found the perfect biographer.

Los Angeles Times

BOOK REVIEW

'Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus' by Clifton Crais and
Pamela Scully

A fascinating exploration of one of the most famous, least-known
women in history.

By
Martin Rubin February
11, 2009

When we think of the period two centuries before our own, then as now it is
global conflicts that dominate: the titanic Napoleonic struggles and our own
nasty little scrap with England in the War of 1812.

Of course, we remember that Jane Austen was writing at this time, even if she
seldom deigned to mention current events; and who can forget the early 19th
century Empire style of dresses, which hearkened back to the simplicity of
Ancient Greece and foretold the freer fashions of the 1920s?

But in recent decades, historiography has opened up our knowledge of the past by
roaming far beyond the conventional confines of warfare and political economy
and, in the process, uncovered terrific stories, such as the shameful and tragic
tale of the hapless Sara Baartman.

A sensation in its time, the story of the so-called Hottentot Venus seems to us
a terrible story of humiliation and degradation, a victimization that continued
even after her death, far away from her birthplace in a desolate region of the
Eastern Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa.

A member of a small indigenous tribe of herdsmen dubbed the Hottentots by Dutch
colonists (but known today by their name Khoikhoi), Baartman was captured in the
course of ongoing colonial warfare that effected a genocidal destruction of this
peaceful people. Having been enslaved, she was taken to Europe by a member of
the family that "owned" and exhibited her much as an exotic animal might be.

Sign of the times
Professors Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully of Emory University have done an
excellent job not only of telling this rebarbative story but of putting it into
the context of its time. This enables them to explain what permitted such an
exhibition while at the same time viewing it through our (thankfully) more
humane and enlightened lens.

1810 through '15, when this revolting scene was unfolding on the stages of
London and Paris, was an odd time in the deplorable history of slavery. The
slave trade in the British Empire had just ended in 1807, a year before the U.S.
Constitution mandated the end of importing slaves, but the institution itself
would not end in the empire until 1833.

Still, there was already sufficient abolitionist feeling in Britain for Baartman
to have been brought before a court in London and examined in Dutch, a process
that led to a determination that she was a voluntary participant in what was
happening to her and that she was receiving a share of the profits from the
enterprise.

So was this an unusual opportunity for a slave to escape drudgery and profit
financially or a degradation and victimization?

Possibly both.

Humiliating as the process seems to us, it tapped into a sentimental cult of the
so-called noble savage popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Condescending as
such a notion now seems, it was in its time thought to be a broad-minded,
humanistic way of thinking, a salutary reminder of how political correctness
changes over time.

The name "Hottentot Venus" is problematic today -- the name Hottentot derives
from the Dutch/Afrikaans word for "stuttering," a derogatory reference to the
clicks characteristic of the tribe's spoken language -- but lingers in the name
Hottentot Fig for the succulent known more commonly as ice plant, seen
throughout Southern California.

Genetic traits

And as for "Venus," there was also an unmistakable prurience involved in showing
Baartman off to European audiences. She exhibited the common genetic traits of
the Khoikhoi: a marked steatopygia and also the condition known as sinus pudoris.
This latter, sometimes called the apron, involved a natural elongation of the
labia, which female family members often stretched to accentuate -- a process
now regarded as a type of genital mutilation.

Baartman never allowed this feature of hers to be shown to audiences while she
was alive, giving credence to her active participation in the exhibition
process. But after her death from pneumonia or possibly from smallpox in Paris
in 1815, a grotesque autopsy shone a spotlight on this, amounting to a
posthumous violation even more unsavory than anything visited upon poor Sara in
her short life.

It is not surprising that this victim should have cried out for some measure of
redress in the 21st century. The post-apartheid government of South Africa
brought her body back from its French burial place in 2002 to be buried in her
native soil with all the trappings of a state funeral, duly televised, a symbol
of global as well as national victimization.

Baartman's story has been the subject of works by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks
and biologist Stephen Jay Gould as well as by poets as diverse as Edith Sitwell
and Elizabeth Alexander, recently famous for her poem at President Obama's
inauguration but whose first published book hearkened back to Sara.

No one, however, has succeeded as well as Crais and Scully in illuminating not
only her important role as icon and symbol but, so important, the human being
behind them.

Because of their diligent research and their deep understanding of the era in
which she lived -- along with their sensitivity to our own time and concerns --
they have truly given us the "living breathing person" that was "Sara Baartman,
the human being who was ultimately destroyed by an illusion."

Rubin
is a critic and the author of "Sarah Gertrude Millin: A South African Life."

Times Higher Education

19 February 2009

The reality behind
the fantasy

Kaila Adia Story lauds this
powerful effort to reclaim the history of a woman abused by European society

Sara Baartman and The Hottentot
Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography

By Clifton Crais and
Pamela Scully

Princeton University
Press 248pp, £21.95

ISBN 9780691135809

Published 20
November 2008

In Sara Baartman
and The Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography, Clifton Crais and Pamela
Scully tell a chilling tale of exploitation in recounting the life of Sara
Baartman (1789-1815), a Khoekhoe woman born in present-day South Africa,
enslaved and brought to England to be "exhibited". In doing so, they also
examine the idea of the woman who would become known throughout Europe as the "Hottentot
Venus", and upon whom were projected notions of hypersexuality and immodesty.
The authors also recount the scientific, genealogical, sociopolitical and
differential conclusions that Europe reached with regard to the black female
body. Finally, they discuss in detail how Europe would overdetermine the anatomy
and assumed persona of the black female body to such a degree that it ultimately
became a representation of itself.

In this descriptive and elaborate outline of both Baartman's
true life and her performance life, Crais and Scully allow the reader to see
that although she was regarded as the object of Western scientific discourse in
the early 19th century, she is clearly the subject of their book. They reveal
that through Baartman's exhibitions and ultimate dissection after her death, her
body was both erotic and propagandistic, and make it clear that Baartman
provided a corporeal starting point, with her body and assumed persona
transformed by Europe into the actual corporeal representation of its
projections and/or imagination. Crais and Scully emphasise that Baartman's
representation and the discourse surrounding her "fleshy" figure have informed
our collective perception of what it physically means to be both black and
female.

Although Crais and Scully make this clear early on in their
exquisite book, the argument that Baartman existed only in the European
imagination is not the crux of their piece. While the authors do argue this
point throughout the book, they make it clear that their main objective was to
recover and rewrite the history of the woman Sara Baartman, rather than to tell
their audience about the performer Hottentot Venus.

Having conducted my own research on Baartman, this book provides
me with a wealth of information about who she was before she was shipped north
and made to perform as Europe's sexual proclivity and running joke. Not only do
Crais and Scully provide the reader with extensive detail on Baartman's life,
but they also give the reader a clearer picture of how she became the Hottentot
Venus and how the Hottentot Venus became an icon.

This is a thrilling, provocative and interesting exploration.
The reader learns about how Baartman's life was transformed once she became the
Hottentot Venus, and is given a vivid snapshot of what the sociopolitical and
ideological climate of Europe was when Baartman reached its shores. Crais and
Scully literally recover Baartman - the public spectacle and the "scientific
discovery" - as so much more.

Not only is this book a fascinating read, it will also have done
much to restore the historical record in Europe and the US. It is an important
and necessary contribution to the existing discourse on Sara Baartman's impact
on contemporary ideas of race, sexuality and the European conception of
primitivity.

Kaila Adia Story is
assistant professor, Audre Lorde endowed chair in race, class, gender and
sexuality studies, University of Louisville. Her essay "Performing Venus: From
Hottentot to Video Vixen: The Historical Legacy of Black Female Body
Commodification", drawn from her doctoral thesis, appears in the edited volume
Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop and Feminism (2007).